Takeout, A Reward And A Comfort
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What role does takeout play in our emotional well-being?
We're here because your heightened awareness deserves heightened entertainment. The Last Show with David Cooper Did you have a particularly great day at work or a downright terrible one? In either case, chances are for you, dinner showed up to your place in a takeaway bag. Takeout seems to have become our universal reward, our comfort, our emotional support meal, a way to treat yourself when things happen at work. I am here with Dr. Susanna Forwood, a psychology professor at Anglia Ruskin University, who has studied just this. Susanna, welcome to the show.
Hi, thank you for inviting me.
When you and your fellow paper authors, professors were sitting around thinking about what to research, did you think, hey, we want to just get some takeaway and have the uni pay for it?
No, so this is nuts as a topic for research.
How did Dr. Forwood's research on takeout begin?
So my area is normally like regular food choice. And I was chatting with a colleague who works on deservingness and social justice and the idea that we do things because we feel that we deserve them. And this paper was a mashup of the two. So this is what happens when two academics with non-overlapping topics kind of come up with something in the middle space. It's all about self-gifting. So what do we allow ourselves to do? Either because we're celebrating a success or because we're consoling ourselves from a bad day. And we were really just interested in exploring the relative likelihoods of different behaviours. takeaway wins takeaway wins over the other four that we we looked at but what this study really points us to is that this is a huge area actually self-gifting what the the little daily behaviors that we do uh when things are going great or things are going bad there's quite a lot of questions in this space that haven't really been explored fully so i'm not going to be able to answer all your questions but yeah it's a it's an it's an interesting one
Look, here in North America with these fancy apps, you know, these delivery and takeout apps, the orders have gotten so expensive.
What is self-gifting and how does it relate to food choices?
I do feel like it's like it's a reward when I've had a really rough day or when we're celebrating something like some mini milestone.
It kind of has to be.
Anecdotally, like I completely agree with what you found, but let's talk about how you actually like figure this out. How do you figure out that people are rewarding themselves or treating themselves on a rough day with takeaway?
So what we do here is a little bit of hypothetical. So on this study, we're asking people to imagine a day. And they are actually randomized to different instructions. So some of them are asked to imagine a regular day. Others are asked to imagine a really bad day and we give them a kind of, your meeting went badly, your boss is upset with you. We kind of give them a bit of an unpacking of what a bad day might be.
How do people reward themselves after a good or bad day?
And then the third group were given, you've had a really good day, you nailed that meeting and your boss has taken you on side and given you a little well done and your teammates are really happy with you. And so everyone didn't see the others. They only saw the version that they had. And then what we did was we asked them, OK, imagine you've had that day. What are you likely to do next? And we actually gave them a kind of a list of options. And the options were to have some alcohol, to eat some chocolate, to get a takeout, to do some kind of an online shopping spree. We didn't say what they might want to buy on that shopping spree, but, you know, like you sit at the computer and have fun. Or, and the fifth option was a bubble bath.
Ooh, bubble bath.
What behaviors were compared in Dr. Forwood's study?
So again, all those behaviors, we were very aware that not everyone is going to do all of those things. Maybe you don't have a bath. Maybe you're allergic to chocolate. Maybe you just don't drink alcohol. Full stop. So we also separately in the study asked people, would they ever do these behaviors? So the data we actually analyzed filtered out people that just would never do those things. Got it. So if takeout is not an option for you and all the people like you, that data was excluded from the takeout behavior.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What role does takeout play in our emotional well-being?
0:00–0:51
2
How did Dr. Forwood's research on takeout begin?
0:51–2:01
3
What is self-gifting and how does it relate to food choices?
2:01–2:48
4
How do people reward themselves after a good or bad day?
2:48–3:36
5
What behaviors were compared in Dr. Forwood's study?
3:36–4:49
6
How does takeout compare to other self-gifting behaviors?
4:49–6:06
7
Are people aware of their emotional eating habits?
6:06–7:29
8
What healthier alternatives to takeout can people consider?
7:29–10:10
Speakers
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